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Dr. Leana Wen in 2019.
Photo:
Lloyd Fox/Associated Press
Public-health commentator
Leana Wen
may relate to the biblical saying that a prophet is never honored in her own home. A few years ago she was pushed out as president of Planned Parenthood because she wasn’t radical enough on abortion. Now the erstwhile supporter of government Covid mandates is enduring the wrath of public-health activists for saying we need to learn to live with Covid.
Dr. Wen, a CNN commentator, was once a defender of government vaccine and mask mandates. Last fall she opined that the Biden Administration’s vaccine mandates didn’t go far enough. “Why didn’t Biden announce that he will mandate vaccinations for plane and train travel?” she said.
But her columns in recent months have sung a new Covid tune, encouraging governments to drop mask mandates and embrace “individual responsibility.” This is what some of us have argued all along. But no political epiphany goes unpunished. And now more than 600 activists are demanding that the American Public Health Association cancel her as a panelist at a conference this autumn.
The subject of her panel: “Harassment, bullying and death threats: Staying the course while under attack.” She is supposed to give advice to fellow public-health officials about how to brave a backlash to their overreaching policies. Now she’s under attack for walking back support for the left’s overreaching policies.
Her opponents accuse her of promoting “unscientific, unsafe, ableist, fatphobic, and unethical practices.” They take issue with a column in which she argued that large events such as Washington’s Gridiron Club dinner in April should go on despite the contagion risk. “This is our new normal—one that’s based on individuals being thoughtful about their own risks and the risks they pose to others,” she wrote.
Dr. Wen’s positions “assumed a capacity for personal responsibility that was not available to vast swaths of the population,” Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation epidemiologist
David Swedler
told Inside Higher Ed. He captures the mindset of the public-health ruling class: People are too stupid or selfish to be allowed to make their own choices.
Apparently public-health experts also can’t be allowed to make their own decisions about whether to listen to Dr. Wen.
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